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Skyrim is the bukkake love-child of a myriad different games. Expansive open world, hand-crafted dungeon crawls, a classless class system, strong RPG character and story elements, and moral decision making, join in a glorious choir of M-rated harmony. In this figurative DNA-test we will look at the parentage of Skyrim’s open-world frontier. The transition from Elite, Legend of Zelda, Super Mario 64, and into The Elder Scrolls series is like witnessing a cocoon mature and give birth to a beautiful nordic mountain range.

In part one we talked about the ways in which Assassin’s Creed sprouted legs and learned to leap from the original Prince of Persia. In this second part we will examine how it came to crawl, duck, fall into bales of hay, and other generally suspicious activities. The roots of the stealth genre can be found all the way back in 1987, hiding under a box titled Metal Gear.

Ubisoft, and other modern gaming behemoths, no longer conjure new concepts from the ether. Ideas don’t come into this world screaming, wailing, and covered in placenta. Instead, like so many Pokemon, they evolve. Your Prince of Persia is now an Assassin’s Creed! Each new franchise goes through a multi-year period of development and refinement, as did Assassin’s Creed and its gargantuan 15 iteration span of sequels and novels, but the genesis of the core game dates as far back as 1989’s Prince of Persia and 1987’s Metal Gear.